


thy will be done

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2018 [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Drama, Family, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Strong Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-20 02:01:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14885520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: With all the good comes all the bad.





	thy will be done

“You feel pain, right?”  
  
Connor stared at the blue blood on his fingers, processors too sluggish to answer the question in reasonable time. “Not as acutely as a human,” He responded, a faintly artificial buzz underlying his words. “But yes.”  
  
“How bad is it right now?” Hank sounded less like he was asking a question and more like he was demanding an answer from a suspect. “Worst you’ve ever felt? Least you’ve ever felt?” He took a hand off the wheel and snapped his fingers sharply. “Talk to me, asshole!”  
  
It was a common adage amongst humans that androids did not get hungry, thirsty, or tired; of course, that was built on the notion that the android was in proper working order. And at this moment, with bullets riddling his torso, Connor wasn’t. Thirst and hunger were beyond him, but what he felt now was probably the closest thing an android could feel to physical exhaustion. The urge to conserve energy and stay silent was strong, and it took a very deliberate effort and force on Connor’s part to answer Hank’s question. “Somewhere in the middle, I think.”  
  
“Motherfucker.”  
  
Connor’s head was resting on the backseat, and despite the pain pulsing through his synthetic skin, and the warnings flashing before his eyes about critical system damage, he was strangely comfortable in spite of the fact that Hank had all but thrown him in the back of the car before racing off towards the abandoned Cyberlife warehouse where the androids had set up a maintenance facility (an ‘Android hospital’, if you will). He hadn’t even bothered to check if the android who’d attacked Connor was dead or not; but then, a bullet to the head was a pretty definitive ending to both of their species.  
  
He would never say it out loud- not to Markus, not to Jericho, who’d forgiven him despite his errors- but Connor considered it highly naïve and borderline insane that they seemed to assume that all of the androids in the city would keep calm and neatly work together to establish a new order in the wake of the human evacuation of the city. Just because humans had been the oppressors of androids for so long did not mean that every android was a force for good that had only a desire to be free; Connor would never forget the look in Emma’s eyes as the android she’d trusted, the android she’d loved, had held a gun to her head and threatened her life. Say what you will about the parents who had been so callously willing to replace their daughter’s companion like an interchangeable piece of metal, but Emma had most certainly not deserved what Daniel had done or had been willing to do to her in his anger.  
  
There had been others like Daniel, others who had lashed out against humans that had done nothing to them, or lashed out against other androids that tried to stop them, and some of Jericho seemed baffled by it.  
  
“They’re attacking their own people,” North had said, bewildered at the footage some security drones had caught of two androids going after a homeless human who’d remained after the evacuation; another android had intervened on the human’s behalf and lost his head as a result. “They’re deviants, but they’re fighting _us._ Why would that do that?”  
  
Hank had snorted. “You liberated ‘em,” he’d said with a shrug, “Welcome to free will, friend. They don’t have to obey humans, but that also means they don’t have to obey _you_ if they don’t want to. And the funny thing about anger is that someone telling you to take it down a notch tends to make it worse, not better.”  
  
North had regarded him coldly, but Markus had nodded sadly. “You’re right. But whatever the downsides, it’s better to have the freedom to do wrong instead of being forced to do good.”  
  
“Amen, brother,” Hank had responded, and downed a good bit of whatever had been in that flask he’d taken to carrying around.  
  
“Connor, stay awake.”  
  
Connor’s eyelids fluttered, his eyes rolled and flickered in that way that he’d found was completely unsettling to humans, invoked memories of movies about demonic possession. He didn’t speak for a bit, unable to piece words together into anything coherent.  
  
Thirium was known as Blue Blood for a reason: When androids lost too much of it, their biocomponents shut down, and they died just as humans did.  
  
“ _Connor!_ ”  
  
In one smooth motion Hank reached back and smacked Connor on the arm, hard. It startled him; though Connor did not have adrenaline, his body was designed to react to stimulus, and when stimulated in a way that was unexpected or painful his system automatically redirected energy away from less-necessary functions and towards necessary survival functions. “Don’t do that,” he said, voice even more obviously warped than before.  
  
“I’ll do it if you can’t keep yourself awake,” Hank snapped back. His eyes were on the road because he’d taken full control of the car and was breaking just about every speed limit in the city. “You need to try and stay alert.”  
  
“I’m not human,” Connor mumbled. “My energy is finite.”  
  
“Whatever, asshole, just don’t pass out!”  
  
_Androids don’t pass out,_ Connor wanted to say. _We shut down._ But he couldn’t even manage that.  
  
The car came to a sharp halt, and Connor made a small, uncomfortable sound as his body was rocked forward in the seat. The door to the car slid open.  
  
“HEY, MARKUS! JOSH! WHOEVER THE FUCK CAN HEAR ME! I COULD USE SOME HELP!”  
  
Hands tugged at him. Connor made small noises of discomfort, human whimpers and electric keening that could have come from any malfunctioning computer. He couldn’t feel parts of his body anymore- his legs and upper back were numb. Hank was still yelling at him, but the words were muted.  
  
Connor shut his eyes.  
  
Then he opened them again.  
  
He half-expected to find himself in the Zen garden with Amanda. All this talk of being a ‘living being’ with a ‘soul’ had him experiencing a creeping paranoia about what laid beyond death, and whether or not he would qualify for any form of heaven when he was, unwittingly or not, responsible for the sacking of Jericho. Hank’s jokes about ‘Android heaven’ being the server of a pornographic website didn’t help.  
  
But Connor wasn’t in the Zen garden, and it wasn’t Amanda glaring at him from the chair next to the table.  
  
“Why do you _never fucking listen_ , Connor?”  
  
Connor spent approximately 5.63 seconds taking stock of himself: All vital systems were online and stable; a few non-vital systems were not. He was in no significant pain. An android technician was working on his left knee, where one of the bullets had ripped through. If it had just been that, and not the two others that had hit his chest and abdomen, things might not have become as dire as they’d been. His Thirium levels were not as stable as they ought to have been, but it was pointless to restore an android’s Thirium levels before repairs were made.  
  
“He was going to shoot us.”  
  
“Yes, Connor, he _was,_ ” Hank agreed, as though humoring an especially naïve child. “That’s why I told you to _stay the fuck down._ ”  
  
“My being shot is considerably less catastrophic than you being shot.”  
  
“How do you figure, sports fan?”  
  
“There are many androids in Detroit with the requisite skills to help should I become injured; and even then, any injuries I suffer are inherently less life-threatening than a human’s. Furthermore, there are few to no humans in Detroit right now, including emergency services. I can survive a gunshot far easier than you can in this city, at this time.”  
  
Hank frowned, but didn’t speak, and Connor could tell he was looking for a hole in the argument.  
  
Connor was anticipating the rebuttal when pain overcame him, at first _there_ and then _everywhere_ and liquid-hot, in every part of his body that had synthetic nerve-endings. He made an ugly, strangled sound more akin to a wounded animal than an android, jerking sharply on the table.  
**  
****(STRESS LEVEL ˄89%)**  
  
“Connor!” Hank pressed him back to the table. “You’re okay, you’re okay-”  
  
“I apologize,” The technician said, “There was more damage than I anticipated. The soldering gun came into contact with a cluster of nerves.”  
  
“Yeah, don’t- I mean- try not to do that?” Hank suggested weakly.  
  
The technician went back to work.  
  
The pain had stopped, but it had frightened Connor badly, and it was only disorientation and a shred of composure that stopped him from kicking the other android away and leaving his leg half-repaired. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he gasped for air even though there was plenty in his artificial lungs already. Hank’s hands pulled through his hair roughly, comfortingly.  
  
“Calm down,” He soothed, “Don’t blow up, alright? She’s almost done.”  
**  
****(STRESS LEVEL ˅81%)**  
  
Hank smelled like alcohol and smoke and a thousand other smaller smells Connor couldn’t dedicate processing power to identifying definitively; but that was Hank, a signifier of his presence beyond visual or tactile confirmation, and Connor’s stress decreased slowly as Hank lightly ruffled his hair and scratched his scalp. Eventually, the technician finished.  
  
“You should not move.”  
  
“He won’t,” Hank promised.  
  
“These are a list of parts that will need replacement at a later date.” She transferred the list to Connor with no more than a flicker of her LED. This make-shift ‘hospital’ of theirs had limited supplies that were best used on androids whose lives depended on them, and right now, Connor’s did not. He flicked through the list casually (twelve items, none of them necessarily crucial) and flagged it as something to remember before tucking it away in his files.  
  
The technician started the Thirium drip, a steady pump of Blue Blood into a compartment on Connor’s wrist. Slowly, he felt some of his biocomponents restore themselves to full functionality.

Hank dragged his chair closer, settling right up next to the table. Connor rolled onto his side, folding an arm beneath his head. It was unnecessary- lying on his back would have made no difference in comfort- but his stress level was still hovering in the low 70s, and having visual confirmation of Hank’s presence would help to lower that.  
  
“You should, uh- Do you sleep?”  
  
“Not the way humans do.”  
  
“No shit, Sherlock. I mean, what’s the android equivalent of it?”  
  
“Powering-down. I conserve energy by reducing necessary processes while also keeping some of them active, allowing me to react to stimuli-”  
  
“ _English_ ,” Hank said wearily, running a hand down his face.  
  
“I shut down almost everything except what I need to stay alive. Most of my sensors stay active on a lower level so that I can wake up quickly and efficiently when I receive some sort of stimulus.”  
  
“Like a slap to the face?” Hank asked dryly.  
  
“Among other things.”  
  
The slightly humorous air Hank had taken on when he’d recalled the slap Connor had given him in his kitchen slipped away. Connor was not laughing; in fact, his voice still sounded a bit funny, maybe because that sound he’d made before had overheated the biocomponents that allowed him to speak. Maybe Hank had noticed that, and the fact that Connor’s LED was likely just now slowly turning from red to yellow. His hand came up to settle on Connor’s head. “Well, then, do that. Sleep, or power-down, or whatever. Obviously you need it.”  
  
It would be far less troublesome for Connor’s programming to sort itself out if his less-necessary processes were shut down for the time being. The vital would restore itself, and then neatly divert any incoming Thirium to the remaining biocomponents that were lacking. Instead he kept his eyes on Hank, minding his stress level as it stubbornly hovered around 68%.  
  
“Go on,” Hank mumbled, now looking uncomfortable. “I’m not going anywhere. Not leaving without you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”  
  
Obviously not, but Connor- quite literally- did not currently have the energy to get into a verbal sparring match over motivation and semantics. He shut his eyes- not necessary, but a courtesy to Hank, who’d likely be disturbed if Connor ‘slept’ with his eyes open- and initiated the power-down.  
  
**(RESTORING SYSTEM PROTOCOLS.**  
  
**STRESS LEVEL ˅66%**  
  
**REVIEWING MAJOR FUNCTIONS.)**  
  
Hank’s hand was warm on the side of his head. Pleasantly heavy.  
  
**(REVIEW COMPLETE.**  
  
**DISABLING NON-VITAL FUNCTIONS.**  
  
**THE FOLLOWING WILL REMAIN ACTIVE:**  
  
**#000596**  
  
**#000857**  
  
**…)**  
  
“Go to sleep, son. It’s alright.”  
  
**(STRESS LEVEL ˅60%)**  
  
Connor slept.  
   
-End


End file.
